JBThazard

Yo.
My imagination is like my penis.
Dark and massive.

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Audiophile Rant #1:
The basic argument of a pseudo-audiophile: "I'd rather pay an extra few hundred bucks for a pair of headphones that features a priority in being a trendy, bandwagon-humping fashion statement and masks its driver-quality flaws with overcompensated bass for the ignorant metal/hip-hop/dubstep fans, instead of paying the same price or slightly less for professional DJ/home-studio quality listening."
Enjoy your $200 paint jobs.

Audiophile Rant #2:
Why is it that most younger, modern vinyl collectors are Indie nerds who care about the sagacity of record ownership more than the audio quality?

Audiophile Rant #3:
A lot of people nowadays claim it's impossible to hear the difference between "high" quality MP3s at 320 kilobits per second and Free Lossless Audio Codec (usually 700-1000kbps) and try to discredit the purpose of using FLAC because of the allegedly identical sound quality despite larger file sizes. I merely consider this a euphemism for:
"My brain's temporal lobe has a diminutive frequency response of 16 000 hertz or less; I trust Apple's $30 earbuds to tell me how music actually sounds; I listen to poorly mixed/recorded/produced/mastered music with no sense of intricacy or subtlety or sophistication."
Every time you say "320kbps = FLAC", you admit to the inferiority of your own brain, your own style in audio equipment, and perhaps even your own taste in music.

Audiophile Rant #4:
Most people truly have no idea what they are talking about when they say the production on an album is "good". What the fuck do you people mean by "good"? Being able to hear the bass? Understanding the vocals easier than usual? Other incredibly misguided or uneducated reasons that stem from using poor equipment, or a lack of knowledge concerning the Loudness War? Are people so used to shitty 192kbps rips and extremely poorly mastered music that something as rudimentary as noticing AN ENTIRE INSTRUMENT is considered superlative?

Audiophile Rant #5

Audiophile Rant #6
So some of you have smartened up and realized MP3 is simply not that good sounding an audio format. It isn't even the best lossy codec, considering Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) and OGG Vorbis have frequency responses as high as 20khz and bit rates as high as 400 or 500kbps. And yet some of you whine and go "Ahh man, I like Vorbis so much more, but MP3 is so damn popular, everyone uploads in it, 90% of people don't even know about anything else...I may as well stick to MP3, it's so damn universal"........Do you wanna know why MP3 is so damn universal? BECAUSE QUITTERS LIKE YOU REFUSE TO USE AAC, OGG & FLAC. The more we start using different codecs, the more aware other listeners will become of them, and the more people will understand that uploading files in better quality should become a bigger trend.

Audiophile Rant #7:
It makes me happy to see vinyl regaining popularity amongst the people. Even if most people don't understand the "science" or specifics of audio, people know they are getting "purer" sound, so that's all that matters. Right? Record labels and musicians who release vinyls come off as amateurs when they do it still. A lot of modern day music is still recorded digitally in "Redbook" or CD standard, of 16bit/44.1khz, and a lot of modern day bands STILL release vinyl copies with this redbook quality. What does this mean? Many vinyls are not actually in possession of analogue sound, and perhaps other than superior mastering, many of them sound exactly the same as their CD counterparts, just that some things are easier to notice. It's almost like converting your mp3s into FLACs and going "ZOMG SOUNDS SO MUCH BETTER NOW DERP". But no! Don't worry! The dynamics and soundstage are so much better! Look! WELL....It's obvious that it is very easy for CDs to acquire DR scores way past an average 10. Yet the Loudness War tries to fool us, and say that we need to spend extra on vinyls because CDs are incapable of better mastering/sound imaging/dynamics. But this is not true. CDs had an average of 14 DR before the 1990s, and now the average is 8. Are some record labels using the loudness war to both sell CDs with inferior quality in order to motivate people to buy vinyls that are only 5% better sounding, when they should be.....300% better? Vinyls are only worth buying if recorded at analogue, or at least at a high sample size and sample rate, let us say, no less than 24/96. Otherwise, you may as well stop glorifying your useless "purer" sounding collections.

Audiophile Rant #8:
It's adorable to hear people try and argue that audiophiles don't care about the music, or due to their passion for specifics regarding audio, they care about equipment and fidelity more than the music itself. Let us consider this: the only reason audiophiles become audiophiles is because they wish to understand their music better. The headphones, the sound cards, the amplifiers and record players are all merely means to an end, and that end is hearing music better. We are fed up with mp3 being the dominant codec, with too much noticeable information deleted. We are fed up listening to incomplete versions of the music we love. We work harder than any other music fans to constantly strive for better quality, in the hopes that we may understand our favorite music perfectly. Do audiophiles inherently care about music more than non-pedantics? Perhaps not. But don't make the non-sequitur and say that because we fap over awesome headphones doesn't mean we don't know how to fap over the music we will play out of them.

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Regarding Brian Eno.

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Yo, here is the long and obligatory favorite quotes section. All of them are very important to me in various ways...even the ones I don't agree with.

"Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things."
- Thomas Stearns Eliot

"Most people like music because it gives them certain emotions such as joy, grief, sadness, an image of nature, a subject for daydreams or – still better – oblivion from “everyday life”. They want a drug – dope - ...Music would not be worth much if it were reduced to such an end. When people have learned to love music for itself, when they listen with other ears, their enjoyment will be of a far higher and more potent order, and they will be able to judge it on a higher plane and realize its intrinsic value...I consider that music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, or psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc.... Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence...For the phenomenon of music is nothing other than a phenomenon of speculation...The elements at which this speculation necessarily aims are those of sound and time...consequently music is a chronologic art...All music is nothing more than a succession of impulses that converge toward a definite point of repose...my freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each of my undertakings...I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacle...The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit."
- Igor Stravinsky

"When talking to people about Blue Lambency Downward, I've noticed that they tend to describe the sound as jazz-influenced. If there is some validity to these claims, is this more of an aesthetic or orchestration influence or do other elements of jazz find their way onto the album? In particular is there any improvisation on the album or in a live setting?"
- Sputnikmusic
"That's definitely a misclassification, probably due to the horns instrumentation, brushed drumming, swung rhythms, things like that. I'm not a jazzer though. It's not my background and there is absolutely no improvisation . What I've noticed is that the people who say there's a jazz thing going on are rock fans who don't listen to jazz and think they maybe might have an idea of what jazz is. A lot of people like to say they "listen" to something, but it's just as a stamp of identity. "Rock Fans' Guilt" is that they know their music is dumber than jazz or classical, so they have to say they listen to that stuff so other people will believe that they can speak intelligently about music!"
- Toby Driver

"A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams."
"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
"Earth laughs in flowers."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."
- Wallace Stevens

"Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men."
- Jean Rostand

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
- Albert Einstein

"There are unjust laws just as there are unjust men."
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

"God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live."
- Stephen King

"A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us."
"A man is half insane and half god."
- John Steinbeck

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
- Ernest Hemingway

"Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life."
- George Bernard Shaw

"Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice."
- William Shakespeare

"It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory."
- Francis Scott Fitzgerald

"To insult someone we call him "bestial." For deliberate cruelty and nature, "human" might be the greater insult."
- Isaac Asimov

"You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"The only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this."
- John Stuart Mill

"By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest."
- Confucius

"If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences."
- Howard Phillips Lovecraft

"You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Art is the habit of the artist."
- Flannery O'Connor

"...No, it is impossible; It is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence,- that which makes its truth, its meaning - its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone...."
- Joseph Conrad

"History implies exhortation, because it is confession, failure and triumph. It is the measure of our capacity, the link between man and man, the key to ourselves. The lack of a sense of history, or the mechanistic view of it as immutable and inevitable, is the death of man."
- Stanley Diamond

"I am, I exist, that is certain. But how often? Just when I think; for it might possibly be the case if I ceased entirely to think, that I should likewise cease altogether to exist."
- René Descartes

"In reality, when we curse death we only fear ourselves."
- Georges Bataille

"A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.”
- Arthur Schopenhauer

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."
- Ken Robinson

"And no period of time can be happier or more prosperous, than those in which it is never regarded, or heard of."
- David Hume

"What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets."
- André Malraux

"And what does it tell us about the nature of our religious tradition in the West that it should be the Arts and not the churches that have produced far and away the greater number of modern martyrs, persecuted prophets and suffering saints? Nevertheless, to embrace the life of alienation is to embrace a tragic illusion. And people do not live well by illusions. Rather, they will fill the vacuum in their hearts with something . . . anything . . . if need be, with the murdering worship of nation, race, class. Perhaps it was inevitable that we should give ourselves body and soul to the scientific and industrial revolutions. The change came so suddenly and promised so much. But, properly, urban-industrialism must be regarded as an experiment. And if the scientific spirit has taught us anything of value, it is that honest experiments may well fail."
- Theodore Roszak

"...I don't think I really want anything to be perfect. I think it's important that things are flawed. That's what makes a piece of art interesting sometimes, the bit that's wrong or the mistake you've made that's led onto an idea you wouldn't have had otherwise."
- Kate Bush

"The entire series of spasms: scenes of love, of vomiting and excreting, in which the body attempts to escape from itself through one of its organs in order to rejoin the field or material structure."
- Gilles Deleuze

"An atmosphere that is inseparable from its object - is no atmosphere at all."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein

"And what are two thousand years? What, indeed, if you look from a mountain-top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boots will outlast Shakespeare."
- Virginia Wolfe

"Sometimes I think that the surest sign of intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
"There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want."
- Bill Watterson

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one."
- George Raymond Richard Martin

"The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consonant and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only 'good guys' in it, or eating cottage cheese."
"Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best."
"Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny."
"Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe."
- Francis Vincent Zappa

"JBThazard has to be black, have awesome headphones, a sense of humor, and be horny. It's the same qualities I require from a mayun."
- David_J1973/Glampaprog/DoggerDog1973

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Yo, best use of a saxophone of all time.

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This is Mikael Åkerfeldt of Opeth. He deals with progressive death metal, progressive rock, and a godload of many other styles, really. He knows nothing about music theory, was raised as a Swedish bum and has a very narrow taste in music that never goes beyond rock, metal, fusion or blues & jazz. His lyrics are mostly nonsense gothic poetry. But he wrote Blackwater Park, a song that utilizes power chords in the most misanthropically banal method conceivable, so he's a goddamn genius.


This is Christoph Clöser of Drilling and the Club of Gore.
I actually don't know a lot about this man. Except that he and his band ripped off Black Sabbath, Theo Travis and Autopsy.


Miles Davis. The most pretentiously successful jazz musician of history. His most well known album, essentially a technical Blues improvisation, went on to become one of the best selling records of all time, and is highly considered to be the best jazz album by Jazz-fan wannabees who spend their days comparing his work to Radiohead.


This old man is Scott Walker. He used to be a shitty Beatles-ripoff with his [now dead] jackass brother. He then decided to become a hipster and wrote 4 albums by himself that were influenced by chamber music and marginal experimental elements, but still sounded like typical radio emesis. His only great album is his newest one, which many confuse as an avant-garde horror album, but is actually, according to Sonny Boy himself, not unlike any of his other albums, only that The Drift uses "blocks of sound and no arrangements" to evoke the same mood as his poppy baroque releases. His annoying trainwreak vocals have earned him the reputation as the only crooner who resides at the edge of the universe.


This off-looking individual is Francis Vincent Zappa. ...I don't really like any of his songs. His face is pretty ugly and so is his music and album covers. He hides the fact that all he knows how to compose is pseudo-big band jazz with silly lyrics and getting himself sued all the time.


Steven Wilson is the most brilliant songwriter alive considering how he has fooled millions into believing Porcupine Tree as a progressive band and not a pop band. He also has a special way of writing a song that has absolutely no good riffs but manages to be interesting as a self-connective piece...even if it takes 56 album repeats to notice his low-mixing subtleties, which is by the way, the only recording technique he uses to even sound remotely original. Only mereological nihilists can enjoy his music.


Akira Yamaoka is nerdily famous for creating the soundtrack to all of the [good] Silent Hill games. His albums are comprised of industrial and ambient soundscapes, syncopated percussion and occasionally female vocals, all attempts to recreating or fitting the fogginess vibe of the games themselves. Not surprisingly, all of the games' settings are shrouded in mist and fog. Not coincidentally, listening to his music is slightly less boring than trying to eat fog. He seems to hate his fans as some of his song titles include "Die", "I'll Kill You" and "Silent Hill".


Colin Stetson is the exact opposite of every single great new/up-and-coming American Jazz musician in history: he is talentless, Caucasian, and not poor. The man afforded over 20 hi-fi microphones for the recording of his newest album, in order to capture the sounds of his emotive breathing, and the emotive mechanical sounds of his bass saxophone, making him an emotive masterful songwriter, despite his incessantly redundant ambient-sounding, atonal melodies which have very little to do with traditional Free-Jazz. He's often considered "avant-garde", which today really now means "do something banal we can label as innovative", so I guess anything can be freeform Jazz now. It's hard to consider him an actual Jazz player/composer, since he admits to being more of an avant-garde ambient player, often plays hexatonic melodies with no apparent key signature, harmonizes with nothing other than the static feedback of his microphone orgy, and sounds a lot like a non-British, younger Brian Eno. But obviously this is jazz music, because he's holding a saxophone...


Do you know what the most popular genre of music in Japan is that isn't J-rock or Pop? If you guessed Jazz, you're incorrect, because the answer is Hiromi Uehara. Unfortunately inspired by pretentious dirtbag musicians like Dream Theater and Art Tatum, Hiromi's music is as unnecessarily eclectic as her hairstyle (which I theorize is a result of her constant headbanging during live performances...isn't Opeth in need of a new keyboardist?). Her music ranges from pretentious, to elitist, to Tool Shoutbox Elitist. Fast solos with one hand on one piano, and left channel improvisations with the other, ON another piano. This kind of talent is not meant to exist or manifest in music. There are simply too many notes for one to process in a single listen, and I don't know anyone with some ungodly amount of patience to listen to any of her songs a second time.


Toby Driver is inarguably the single most genius living song composer in the universe. Okay...I know I already said that about Stevie Willie, but Toby is technically too godly to even be considered mortal. The fact that his song titles are so [un]ostentatiously abstract and thought-provoking proves that he has explored enough quadrants of material (and probably even astral) metaphysics to make sure he is indeed the best. Yes, that even includes Frott Wanker's crooning corner at the edge of all existence. His music is so brilliant that it proved impossible to contain all of his talent in only one band, thus the revival of maudlin of the Well and their landmark album "Part the Second", which was originally titled "An Inquiry Concerning the Deliberation of Anti-Demagogic Excerpts Expounding upon the Sagacious Verbosity of Sophistry 400 Yottameters Before and After the Converging of the Penultimate; or the Revisitation of the Blue Ghost" (who is probably Scott Walker...look up if you need proof).


Mike Patton is the world's greatest avant-garde-progressive-death-metal-alternative-circus-screamo-free-form-delta-blues-jazz-electro-neo-classical-experimental-lounge-porn-funk-carnival-doom-rock-ambient-disco composer. He's also a pretty decent zombie.


Ever wondered what Ralph Waldo Emerson would be like if he were a metalhead? Agalloch's frontman John Haughm is definitely the answer. You can even see him trying to become the creepy, floaty "transparent eyeball" that changed nature fetishism forever. Thing is, his vocals aren't real full blown kvlt black metal vocals, which is fitting since Agalloch doesn't play real full blown kvlt black metal. His lyrics are still pretty cliché, though, either lamenting over lost girlfriends or bloody birds. This man is so obsessed with the wilderness, I can't tell if Pale Folklore is fictive or autobiographical. But in the end it doesn't matter since this guy's a genius for combining post black metal with folk. NOBODY'S EVER DONE THAT BEFORE.


Here is perhaps the most notable traitor in the history of Black Metal. Garm, a man who transcended a stale, cliché genre of folk influenced black metal and turned his group into the ultimate artsy-fartsy of the avant-garde. I guess tremolo minor chords got too difficult and transitioning into electronic bee-boops just felt easier. I respect him, though. He doesn’t give a shit about image, and he was at least a part of Arcturus and Head Control System. Though something tells me Blood Inside, Perdition City and Shadows of the Sun were all recorded on lo fi tapes in the middle of Norwegian forests, just to spite the Black Metal scene.


How did Coltrane believe in all religions and all ideas and notions of God all at once, without contradiction? I don’t remember him ever releasing an autobiography.


Mark Hollis may be the shyest and most introverted rock musician in history. Uncoincidentally, Mark Hollis may be the shyest and most introverted rock album in history. For the man who ripped off Miles Davis in order to invent Post-Rock, it’s interesting how quiet and humble this man can be or sing. What are you trying to hide from us? Why must you cower away from your microphone as if it were hostile? How ironic he would call his band “Talk Talk”. It’s cool, though, because when he finally kicks the bucket, his spirit will simply end up as the laughing stalk of Eden. (I KNOW THAT WAS LAME SHUT UP)

Coming Soon...
- Arvo Pärt
- Brian Eno
- Paul Masvidal
- John Zorn
- Michael Gira

Here are the only female musicians in the world who make me want to stick my mouth in their vaginas:


Kate Bush


Lisa Gerrard


Esperanza Spalding


Mia Matsumiya


Martha Argerich


Sophie Milman


Claudia Brücken


Bebel Gilberto


Chelsea Wolfe


Heidi “Ihriel” Solberg Tveitan


Gallalin


Uta Plotkin


Emmy Rossum


Charlotte Cegarra


Steven Wilson

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